Category Archives: wedding

This day in Bloggerville

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Forgive me, Joni Mitchell.  But it is my birthday and I can’t help but fixate on my mother (z”l) and these ten birthdays since she died, so I made up a verse:

♪ And the seasons, they go ’round and ’round . . .♬  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5HXT0bn7QY

♪Ten birthday cakes and candles come ‘n gone now,
brown hair has turned to gray hair ’round her crown.
She is joyful, even happy ‘though not completely,
’cause Mom won’t see her in her wedding gown.♬
 
♪ And the seasons, they go ’round and ’round . . .♬ 
 
The Blogger family 1966 (I was 2).

 

Dear Mom:

Ten wishes on ten birthday cakes that will never come true.

Every year on your birthday, SOB recounts what you said on your last one, December 11, 2002: “if only my wish could come true . . . ”  I get it.  Hope, reined in by reality.

Dad remembered to call (SOB reminded him).

Remember my short-lived practice of sending you a “thank you” note on my birthday?  The first year, you thought it was very clever.  And then, as you did every year, you launched into the apocryphal story of my noble birth.

SOB and HOSOB sent flowers.  I am giving SOB the silent treatment because I told her to focus on her re-certification exam tomorrow and that she was excused from familial obligations.  If SOB doesn’t realize that I am giving her the silent treatment, I will wait until exactly one minute after her exam to tell her.  It is the least I could do for my big sister.

BOB sent me a positively hysterical email:

“Hope you are having a good day. Maybe you are even playing hooky from work, having a leisurely breakfast with [POB], planning to have lunch with [SOS], getting a relaxing workout in or nap after lunch, then go out to a nice sushi dinner and enjoy a nice glass of wine, read with [SOS] at bedtime, and watch an old movie before drifting off to a relaxing night sleep… or NOT. You are probably getting worn out by some asshole lawyer or ungrateful client and worrying about getting paid or getting business. The life of a lawyer.

Seriously, I hope you do get to enjoy your day. We are all looking forward to coming up in a few weeks. Everyone here sends love and hugs.

I love you,

[BOB]by”

BOB nailed it. Very funny and very true tableau of life as a lawyer.  But actually I did take the day off, because you and the wedding loom large on my birthday and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

This is our unique day; we were one, and then we were two.  48 years ago, I emerged from you, cranky and crying.  plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.  That’s what POB would say if I said this to her.  Yep, she’s right.

I blew out one candle for me and lit another (a Yahrzeit candle) for you.  Because this is our day.

Now that you are gone, I carry you inside of me.  (Just so you know, you are looking slim in our wedding dress.)

I love you,

Blogger

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The Undergarment Day

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Today was the day.  It is a ritual in every woman’s life, especially on the occasion of one’s wedding.

At least once in your life, you go to a place where a woman says, “just as the doctor says, naked from the waist up!!” and then leaves for five minutes.  When she comes back, she sizes up your breasts.  All this in the elusive search for undergarments that give us shape, without the need to re-enact post-partum Scarlett O’Hara trying to get into her pre-pregnancy whale-boned corset.

With the wedding looming large, POB and I walked into The Town Shop, a storied place, where the owner (until the day she died) would “cup” each customer.  WITH HER HANDS.  So you stand naked from the waist up and an old lady comes over  (WITHOUT drawing the curtain on your dressing room) and grabs you and yells out the size and model.  First, humiliation and then triumph.

Even though the proprietor died, her family keeps up the place, and there are enough old women who are brutally honest to make the process just as humiliating and then triumphant.

Bessie helped us today.  She had the air of a Southern black woman whose mama taught her well. Except, she started by telling us she just got the cast off her right arm and made me feel the pin that the doctors inserted.

We told her that we needed help getting the right, supportive undergarments for the wedding dresses we brought with us.

“Which one of you is the bride?”

“We both are”.

“Hmmmm,” with some incomprehension.  It never ceases to amaze me how this still happens in New York City.

She turned to me.  “Let me look at you first.”  Ok, Bessie studied my breasts.   She looked at the dress.  “I am going to have to concentrate very hard here.  Come out here where the light is better.”  That meant I had to step outside the dressing room in full view of everyone in the store — man, woman, child and cat.  “I am thinking D cups for all that! And [looking at the bra I had been wearing] you have some ratty old bras, doncha?” she yelled.  I looked at the floor hoping that the earth would open up so that I might crawl in.

“I also need something for the waist down . . . ” I said as force-ably I could muster after she was off for my new bra.

Bessie came back with a bra.  She strapped me in and then said, “Lean over and let them things settle!” I did as bidden.   “I said LEAN, not pray!”  “Now sit down and jiggle.  Hands up!!  Jump up and down!”  I have never been to Club Med, but this is sounding familiar.  “Ok, now PRAY!” Bessie asked for quiet while she concentrated “fiercely”.  “We need to get you something tighter ’cause you all over the place.”

We settled on a bra that lets me shake, rattle and roll without falling out all over the place.  Then we got to the knee to waist issue.  She brought something so tight, I didn’t know how I was getting into this.  “Well, this will cover that pooch,” as Bessie pointed to the area below my two-pack abs.  “Water gain — she has been traveling,” POB said indignantly and in my defense.  (I ♥ POB.)

“How many people are helping you get dressed?”  A question that implied it would take a village to get us ready on the morning of our wedding.  And she hadn’t even started on POB.  I was ready to call off the wedding, until I thought of Elinor Donahue in Father Knows Best winning the basketball game and having her friends crowd around her and get her into her prom dress so she could be crowned queen.  So, I am thinking about a scrum in rugby, except that we will emerge looking FABULOUS in our dresses.

In order not to embarrass POB, I will just say that POB fared only a little better with our straight-talking Bessie.  POB doesn’t have ratty bras because she came from a good home (as she reminds me).  Ok, except when it came to the zipper for POB’s dress.  “Did you try this dress on before you bought it?” Bessie offered “helpfully” as others needed to assist us because of Bessie’s healing arm. REALLY?

After we were finished, I asked POB if she had arranged for us to be Medi-vac’d home.  “No,” she said, “but we could have a snack on our way to the shoe place.”

This wedding stuff is NOT for the weak. (As for Bessie, I am going next Saturday for some new bras.)

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The Checklist

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In my professional life, I always having a closing checklist for each transaction.  Every piece of paper, every action, every issue goes on a centralized list, with responsible parties, deadlines and status.  Good practice (or malpractice) starts with organization.

As for my personal life, well, not always.  I try to maintain some type of order amid chaos, but let’s face it:  without POB, my life would be a compost.  Even POB was surprised, initially, at what lurked under the veneer of successful urban professional: my bespoke blazers and trousers held together with staples and scotch-tape (but never spit).  Indeed a metaphor for my life then.  The saving grace:  I did have someone come in to clean, do laundry and re-stock toilet paper and other essentials.

So, I wasn’t joking 10.5 years ago when, during a discussion about whether to have a child, I asked POB, “am I not baby enough for you?”  And now we have SOS and I have matured beyond my post-adolescent years.  I am now a somewhat disciplined person in my personal life.

Still, a wedding.  That is a huge undertaking and our mothers are not alive (and even if alive would not be young enough) to take over the process, make it their own, and forget about the two main characters.  How I long for that.  Yes, I said it.  If I could outsource this to our mothers, I would in a heartbeat.   I would get endless blog material.  So, clearly, outsourcing to a professional wedding planner is, well, no fun.

So, here is where we stand (using lavender, as the official color of gay weddings):

  • Dresses:   √
  • Undergarments: next weekend (stay tuned)
  • Shoes: next weekend (stay tuned)
  • Flat tummy and chiseled arms:  works in progress
  • SOS’s suit, shirt and tie: next weekend
  • Rabbi:  √
  • Venue:  √
  • Caterer:  tasting √; final menu:  open
  • Photographer: √
  • Band: √
  • Centerpieces:  in process
  • Wedding cake:  √
  • Invitations: in process (proofed; waiting for printer to send)
  • Ketubah: in process (actually waiting for feedback from rabbi)
  • Chupah: in process (poles reserved; cloth to be determined)
  • Ceremony:  needs work
  • Vows:  oy, don’t ask
  • Our song: still need to tell the band
  • Get:  get what? 

A get.  Let’s just say that one of us needed a religious separation from a long-ago prior commitment.  Traditionally, a get is something that a man gives a woman.  But a man can say no and still, he can remarry (I think).  If a woman doesn’t get a get, she is in limbo; she cannot remarry and her community will shun her.  Forever.  And there are horror stories even today about women in this very circumstance.  It is a terrible rule that confirms a woman’s second class status in traditional Judaism.

In our case, the prior commitment was with a woman, so no need to get a get, right??  Pretty good argument, eh?

Well, since marrying two women under religious law isn’t exactly, let’s say, kosher, our rabbi considers that the getting of a get should also be gender neutral.  Especially since, according to our rabbi, in its best sense, a get is a mutual release from the past.   Really, rabbi?  Sometimes, the past should just hang out there in the ether.  No one ever got bit from a sleeping dog.

Ok, ok, ok, ok, ok.  Service of papers at last known addresses, summons to appear before a Beth Din, a religious court of three rabbis.  Pretty serious business.  The religious court convened on Friday, in the West Village.  The three rabbis, two lesbians and one transgendering person, conducted the proceedings and finalized the releases.  (To show our diversity, the rabbi officiating our wedding is straight.)

The ancients and the current, living orthodox would have keeled over.  But they would have keeled over at the thought of the wedding.  So, I say, let ’em roll, let ’em roll, let ’em roll.

So, to update our checklist:

  • Get:  GOT

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The Indignities of my Inner Bridezilla

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I could write about the impending disasters in the Middle East, the despicable nature of politics generally, or the Super Bowl.  I could write about my utter despair at my dear aunt’s recent and precipitous medical decline or the crazy, sad moments at Sunday night dinner.  But no, let’s go for the total self-indulgent.

I have gray hair.  Lots of it.  I have worn each hair as a badge of honor and spoils of battles well fought (but mostly lost).  The ones in the front are courtesy of POB (partner of blogger).  The ones on either side of my head are gifts from SOS (our son, source of sanity).  The top gray, well, those are genetic.

Still, the salt and pepper is getting too salty.  I am ok with this.  Well, I WAS ok with this until I thought about the wedding.  SOS wants to walk the two of us down the aisle.  POB is blond (and even the color that lurks beneath is not gray yet). So, I had this picture in my mind’s eye of a young man, SOS, walking POB and this other person who looked his grandmother down the aisle.

There was a low rumble, that got steadily louder, and then rose to a roar:

BBBBRR

IIIIIIDDDE

ZIII

LLLLAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

I ran to the hairdresser for some “hair painting”.  POB and our hair dresser said it would only be a few strands here and there.  “Low lights,” they said.  Ok, I thought, having NO idea what that meant.

Sidebar:  A personal note to SNOBFOB (slightly neurotic obsessive about being identified as an FOB).  SNOBFOB, I am sorry.  Together, we pledged our allegiance to graying naturally.  But yours is beautiful and textured and I am getting married.

I went for my hair procedure on Friday.  I was busy emailing and not paying much attention to all the ministrations around me.  I looked up and I thought, “Oh, shit.  This is a full-on dye job!! I look like something out of Star Wars.  What have I done??!!!!!”

As horrified and embarrassed as I was, I needed to have our hair dresser take a picture:

I understand that this is self-inflicted public humiliation.  But when one is so self-righteous (as I was) about not fighting back the gray, I deserve a little humiliation.  You can see the utter despair in my body language.

I woke a sleeping Bridezilla and as a result, I need to knock her down with sedation.

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A Way’s Away but Feels Almost like Tomorrow and Certainly Yesterday

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Yes, we are at 10 years old in this rendering of a picture.  Camp Wingate, Yarmouth, MA.  Summer of 1974.  You can tell the picture is partially a fake because I was wearing shorts and NOT a skirt.

It was just yesterday.  But by the time we are married, it will have been 38 years since we were best friends that summer.  In truth, we didn’t know each other from 18-32; and yet, we have always known each other and been inextricably tied one to the other.

Soon, it will be our wedding day.  Two little girls holding hands as adults who have been through so much, apart and then together.  And we will celebrate all that is us.  The good, the not-so-good, the sad, the joyous, and the things still evolving.

We have all we need (enough flatware to serve 24, for example).  So, when the invitation asks that in lieu of presents you make a charitable donation and we list a few that are important to us, please abide by our wishes.   We have enough and we are healthy and happy and truly there are no greater gifts.  Besides, if I have to store your gift in the limited space of a Manhattan apartment, I am going to regret having invited you.

Share our joy; spare our apartment.

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THE DRESSES, THE DRESSES!!!!

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Our wedding dresses arrived!!!!   They came on Thursday.  So on Friday, I bought one of those horrible, upper-body-toning bars from Hell. (We have sleeveless dresses.)

Being buff and beautiful on your wedding day is serious business.  Because after you say yes to the dress, you need to go through basic training. Navy SEAL-like training.  No wonder people choose to elope.  And white or off-white is sooooooo unforgiving.

And, even with all of this training, let’s face it, at our age, POB (partner of blogger) and I will nevertheless have to rely on modern-day corsets.  There should be a reality TV show contest where the winning bride contorts herself into the sausage casing called Spanx in the least amount of time. A whole new generation of “Beat The Clock”.

I remember my paternal grandmother’s corsets.   She had five live births and she was zoftig (full-figured) to begin with.  So, there needed to be a ghastly amount of squeezing in the middle to create any kind of hour glass shape.  I do remember that her corset made her enormous breasts form a large, nearly flat surface just below her clavicle.  I wonder how she didn’t suffocate.  But I was a convenient tray for balancing dishes while eating at a buffet affair.  Pluses and minuses — isn’t that always the balance?

My goal is to have a sausage casing that doesn’t have to re-distribute my body fat toooo much.  I can imagine — everything looks great, except I have conspicuously enlarged earlobes.

BUT THE DRESSES ARRIVED.  There is no going back.

 

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